Kevin O'Leary V2
Actually, I was born Terrence Thomas Kevin O'Leary. My dad was Irish and he loved long names, but when they got me home, everybody realized it was going to be total confusion because dad was named Terry too. So the next thing I knew, I was Kevin. Two years later, my brother Shane came along.
My dad was a gregarious Irishman and a great salesman. We had a happy family, middle-class. My parents worked hard, but then at the age of 37, Terry, my dad, died, leaving my mother Georgette alone with two young kids. Times looked tough and then, as life would have it, things changed.
My mother Georgette met George, they fell in love and married. She would spend the rest of her life with this man, and George became my stepfather. He was a young man just graduating college at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and our whole family moved there. They were wonderful times, but we didn't know what the future would hold.
When George finally graduated, he joined the ILO, part of the United Nations, and that's when things went wild. We moved everywhere; we saw the world every two years, a brand new country. We started in Egypt, France, Japan, then we lived in Tunisia, Ethiopia, Cyprus, Cambodia, Switzerland. You name it, I've been there.
I didn't know it at the time, but living in all these places around the world and actually seeing them had a profound impact on me. Imagine living in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, at the time of Haile Selassie and actually seeing him long before he became a deity of the Rastafarians, and playing with his lion cubs.
Or living in Phnom Penh during the time of Prince Norodom Sihanouk and his lieutenant Pol Pot, who would eventually lead the Khmer Rouge and was responsible for a genocide of his own people during the horrific killing fields campaign in Cambodia. These were remarkable experiences for me and gave me a unique firsthand education on how the world really works.
Now, you can read a research report on any place, but actually living and being there is a whole different experience and gives you a huge advantage as an investor. Today, some of my best returns are global. When I graduated from college with a degree in environmental studies and psychology, my dad George said, "Look, you're going to starve to death. You're not gonna make any money; go back to business school."
It was great advice. That's exactly what I did, and when I graduated, I started my first company, Special Event Television. We made sports programming for network shows like Bobby Orr and the Hockey Legends and the Original Six. It all worked out, and when we sold the company, I took the proceeds and started Softkey Software Products.
Later, after we had moved to Boston, we turned it into The Learning Company. We sold it for 4.2 billion dollars. It was a huge experience for all of us that were involved, and it changed the way I looked at being an entrepreneur forever.
Today, I believe if you've been successful as an entrepreneur, you owe the next generation a roadmap, not just about your successes but more importantly about your failures, to help them from not making the same mistakes. I've authored three books about money in business, and luckily, they've all been bestsellers.
I got married to Linda when we both had nothing. We couldn't afford a big wedding, so we had a reception in her apartment afterwards and ordered in pizza for our guests. It was a fun wedding anyways, and we were on a journey. If you're trying to build your own business, you make big sacrifices.
When the kids came, we had to work as a team to keep it together. Today, I try and spend as much time with my family as I can to make up for the early days when I was not around. I love to cook, and I'm passionate about O'Leary Fine Wines. I'm still taking pictures, and I love to collect guitars. And oh yeah, I love to play them too.
Like everybody else, I want to be a rock star when I grow up. I spent a lot of time teaching. I tell students, "You don't start a business out of greed. It's not about money. Why do you want to be an entrepreneur? To set yourself free." The pursuit of entrepreneurship is about freedom and helping others achieve their goals at the same time.
Today, I'm the chairman of O'Shares Exchange-Traded Funds. I travel the world for our investors looking for opportunities. It's a global enterprise, and I love my work. People are always asking, "Why do you keep going?" and here's my answer:
If you want to help someone, anyone, anywhere in the world, the best thing you can do is create a job for them. Who does that? Entrepreneurs. I'll spend the rest of my days encouraging people to do exactly what I have done: become an entrepreneur, start a business, and create jobs. There is absolutely nothing in the world more important or noble than that.